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Today I walked into a starbucks and sat down to get some work done. Directly across from me were two older white women. I took one look at their bleached roots and expensive handbags and threw them into a box of my own making. It was a small box, but one that obviously I was comfortable throwing people into.

Now ..before I finish this quick story..let me tell you a little bit about me and boxes.

I hate them. I hate stereotypes. I hate when people lump me into a group based on anything that isn’t the most pure representation of my character. Which of course is impossible. And because I’m hyper-sensitive about these stereotypes I’m constantly trying to figure out what boxes people are heaping me into and trying to expand and tear open their boxes like Godzilla inside a strip mall.

Which makes this stereotyping that I was doing all the more ironic.

So back to these white women, with their bags and their sensible shoes. I had totally thrown them into a box. And not a big box. Or a particularly pretty one. In fact it was a small box, and as usually these boxes have less to do with the people inside them than with their creators; I cant say I took the time to really inspect the box that I had created for them. Until..

I started to overhear parts of their conversation.

The many men names I heard dropped temporarily shrunk the box into a smaller, even more unappealing one. Then as I overheard more (alot of overhearing huh?) I came to realize that the men names weren’t the names of their last flings or drunken fantasy. No these were the names of children. Sons.

It was at this realization that I realized that I had put them into a box. And started to dislike them because lets face it, their box was ugly. So I quickly tried to bedazzle the box I had put them in, so that I would feel better about myself. And as I listened closer, I overheard words like “tests”, “spectrum”, and phrases like “he’s learning to identify emotions in others and learn how to be empathetic”..

Wow. So not only had I put two innocent, hard-working, mothers into the wrong box. I’d managed to stuff them in a box while they were sharing ways to successfully raise children on the autistic spectrum.

Needless to say, I felt like a million bucks. *__*

Anyway..I realized that for all my reading and insights into becoming more/better human being..I still had some huge steps to take when it comes to learning to really love others.